Predicting reading achievement in seventh and eighth-grade English/Spanish bilingual students

The purpose of the study was to investigate the role of oral language proficiency in English, oral language proficiency in Spanish, and reading achievement in Spanish as predictors of reading achievement in English in seventh and eighth grade bilingual students. The subjects were 20 English/Spanish bilingual students in seventh and eighth grade attending junior high school in a suburban Long Island, New York public school district.;Oral language proficiency in English and Spanish was assessed by a combination of (a) a syntactic measure: the Basic Inventory of Natural Language (BINL), and (b) a cognitive-semantic measure: the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery (W-J Battery), Verbal Ability Cluster.;Reading achievement in Spanish was measured by the subjects' Total Reading scores on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills Espanol (CTBS/S). Reading achievement in English, the dependent variable, was measured by the subjects' Total Reading scores on the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT).;Results from the Pearson product-moment correlation indicated that the BINL in English and the W-J Battery, Verbal Ability in English significantly correlated with the SAT in English. These findings then suggested that not only was there a relationship between syntactic structures of oral language and reading achievement in English but also that there was a significant relationship between cognitive-semantic aspects of oral language and reading achievement in English. In addition, results from the stepwise multiple regression formula revealed two significant predictors of the SAT scores in English: the W-J Battery, Verbal Ability scores in English and the CTBS scores in Spanish. Both predictors accounted for 76% of the variance in English.;The importance of native reading skills as well as English cognitive-semantic oral language skills in promoting reading achievement in English were the most significant issues derived from this investigation. Consequently, educators might be wise to consider these two significant predictors when fostering reading achievement in English in bilingual students.